It is known to monitor video quality by using human observers watching multiple television screens.
The last few years have seen a considerable increase in the demand for online video delivery. An internet broadcast ecosystem has developed comprising, in particular, major video service providers, content owners and media-rights holders. This provides a capability to encode, encrypt and DRM (Digital Rights Management)-protect media, insert adverts, switch to different sources, provide blackout management slates, deliver licenses and so forth. End customers use a wide range of live and on-demand media formats and platforms including, for example, Windows Media, Silverlight Smooth Streaming, Adobe Flash, Apple HTTP Streaming (all Registered Trade Marks).
Typically an online video is usable at one or more bitrates. The end user can choose a preferred bit rate or a player can detect the bandwidth and automatically switch between bitrates to provide continuous media playback. Some users broadcast live television programs; they can require a high quality of service and may have aggressive SLA's (Service Level Agreements).
A carrier of internet traffic is expected to quickly detect, assess and resolve any issues that may occur between source and end client, and this creates a demand for a reliable way of continuous monitoring of media.
In one approach, to monitor the service a person is assigned to constantly watch perhaps 100 channels on a video wall, looking for potential issues. However this is expensive and potentially unreliable and it is desirable to find a better solution. The problem is exacerbated because an average channel has from 3 to 6 bitrates and it is desirable to check each separately (is possible for a video encoder to have a fault at one streaming bit-rate only).
An approach from Nagios Enterprises, LLC dumps data files every few seconds and checks the size of the data file. This facilitates identifying problems with connectivity and accessibility, but further automating video monitoring is a difficult problem. This is particularly the case where a multimedia datastream is protected by digital rights management as this constrains the processing of the data—for example the storage of the decrypted data may not be permitted as video generally has copy protection and can only be played a computer that has a valid license. Further, video secured using DRM can generally only be accessed when there are no debugging tools running.